Traveling Light

By JAY COCKS

HARRY AND TONTO

Directed by PAUL MAZURSKY Screenplay by PAUL MAZURSKY and JOSH GREENFELD

Like most old people, Harry Combes needs all the energy he can muster just to stay put. But the cadences of contemporary American life urge change and demand movement. So Harry Combes moves.

A widower, he moves first out of his West Side Manhattan apartment, which has fallen victim to urban renewal, and in with his son and family, who have a small suburban house. The household is in a state of operational turmoil, with rankling dinner-table conversation and fraternal loathing between Harry's two grandsons. Harry is not a burden here; even in the middle of brawls everyone is solicitous of him. The household quickly becomes a weight on him.

So Harry moves again, with a couple of pieces of battered luggage and his pet tabby Tonto for company. He has plans to see his daughter in Chicago and an idea of perhaps settling down in California with his other son. The film tracks Harry on his transcontinental odyssey and watches with amusement as he slides into a decent compromise with age.

As Harry gets farther West, he seems to shed years like epidermal tissue. Romance, mortality, uncertainty are obstacles he negotiates with increasing nimbleness. Change no longer seems such a threat. Indeed, like the calmly eccentric Los Angeles life, like the California sun itself, it becomes a source of energy.

The movie gets off to an awkward start and improves along with Harry as it goes West. Mazursky is a director (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Blume in Love) adept at lancing the excesses and improbabilities of the American culture, but Harry and Tonto is gentler and more bemused than his previous work.

Harry sings old songs to Tonto and reminisces lovingly about his courting and the wonders of his marriage. Reality chips the sentimental patina, though. His children, the products of this blissful union, are the walking wounded. Harry's New York son has resigned himself to a bleak wife and two ungovernable kids. His California counterpart, played with ironic self-pity by Larry Hagman, blubbers like a brat for a loan from Dad and for the benefit of his reassuring presence (he can split the rent that way). The daughter in Chicago (Ellen Burstyn) has just got out of her fourth marriage. Harry recognizes their pain and frustration but never stops to consider the source.

This elusive and bitter irony gets misplaced in the shuffle of celebrating Harry's new mellowness. The movie is fixed in an appealing but minor key because it is imbued with the same kind of sentimentality that Harry has used to coddle himself for so long. It also suffers from Art Carney's portrayal of Harry. He is studious and low-keyed, but his characterization lacks depth and misses the urgencies of old age. Like Carney, Mazursky and Co-Writer Josh Greenfeld are so eager to settle Harry down and give him some sort of peace that they make everything just a little too easy to take and to believe.

Jay Cocks

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